Sunday, January 20, 2013

Amusing Titles in Psychological Science

I recently wrote a post about amusing article titles,
pointing to a tendency in the
current psychological literature (and proposal as well in other fields) to blur
the boundaries between scientific and popular scientific discourse. Here I want
to discuss this trend in more detail.

I want to start by saying that I’m not immune to this trend
myself. I managed to resist it until 2004 but more than half of my 2012 articles
had “amusing” titles. In fact, my co-authors snuck two very similar
titles up on me: Out of Sight out of Mind and Out of Mind out of Sight. I also had Spreading the Words and Language in the Balance. In my defense,
I only was responsible for the last one.

In my previous post, I talked about the reasons for using amusing titles. The main one is the pressure to make
your research relevant to a broader audience. But is it true that amusing
titles are on the rise?

I take Psychological Science as my test case,
examining amusing article titles published in that journal in the last decade.
I have published in Psych Science
myself (four articles and a fifth one in press) and think it has been a great
addition to the field in many ways. There clearly was a need for short incisive
articles. Psych Science was the first
to fulfill that need and has quickly risen to prominence in the field.

At the same time, it is obvious that the journal has come
under fire in recent years. I agree with some of the criticism. For example, when
you see a single issue
featuring the following titles, you can’t help but wonder what kind of image of
psychological science (the field) we are creating.

Sticky Thoughts: Depression
and Rumination Are Associated With Difficulties Manipulating Emotional Material
in Working Memory

Becoming a Vampire Without Being
Bitten: The Narrative Collective-Assimilation Hypothesis

Of Blood and Death: A Test of
Dual-Existential Systems in the Context of Prosocial Intentions

Time Crawls: The Temporal
Resolution of Infants’ Visual Attention

Power and Choice: Their
Dynamic Interplay in Quenching the Thirst for Personal Control

Learning Words in Space and
Time: Probing the Mechanisms Behind the Suspicious-Coincidence Effect

Who Took the “×” out of
Expectancy-Value Theory?: A Psychological Mystery, a
Substantive-Methodological Synergy, and a Cross-National Generalization

The Jekyll and Hyde of Emotional
Intelligence: Emotion-Regulation Knowledge Facilitates Both Prosocial and
Interpersonally Deviant Behavior

What do I mean by amusing
article titles?

I mean titles that are not directly descriptive of the
theory, method, or findings. An example of a descriptive title is this.

Infants' Perception of Phrase Structure in Music

And here is an example of an amusing title.

Serial vs.
Parallel Processing: Sometimes They Look Like Tweedledum and Tweedledee but
They Can (and Should) Be Distinguished

A descriptive title just names the phenomenon, a theory, a
model, the method, or the findings, something like The Effect of X on Y, A Theory of Q, or A New Method for Assessing Z. An amusing title adds nondescriptive information to this
or uses nondescriptive information exclusively. (By the way, these two titles
are from the very first issue of Psych
Science published in January 1990, so the journal was at it at an early
age.)

I culled amusing titles from the 2003-2012 issues of Psych Science. It was not always easy to
determine what was an amusing title and what not. For example, I initially
false-alarmed to this one.

Chicks Like Consonant Music

It actually is descriptive. So it may be that others would
come up with a slightly different set of titles than I did. I think the
differences will be small though.

In this post I will share some qualitative observations (if
you want the entire list of amusing titles, just contact me). In my next post,
I will present some quantitative information and compare Psych Science to two other journals.

What types of amusing
titles are there?

Alluring allusions

The authors refer to some literary work, or song—mostly
songs, actually (I realize that some of these are also regular expressions, of
course).

Don't Stand So Close to Me: The Effects of
Self-Construal on Interpersonal Closeness

These are the most common categories. I think they all serve
the same set of causally connected purposes: (1) attract attention to
themselves (the poetic function that I talked about in my previous
post), (2) therefore be memorable, (3) therefore become a sound
bite for the popular and social media, (4) therefore appeal to the general
public, and (5) therefore show university administrators and politicians that our
work is relevant to the world.

Who are the perpetrators?

Pretty much everyone. I have already turned myself in.
Perpetrators include a self-acknowledged fraudster like Diederik Stapel.

(Obviously “[retracted]” was not part of the original titles.)
But they also include those who are very vocal about the current state of the
field and are proposing reforms. For example, Hal
Pashler committed:

4 comments:

Hi Rolf, I wanted to offer a different perspective on funny titles, but mostly I just want clarify what you're saying, exactly.

First, on the broader communication of science. I agree there are pressures that may lead people to take shortcuts to producing popular articles. I actually don't think funny titles are high on that list, but more on that in a moment. I think it's also important to make the case that we should be doing far more to communicate science to a popular audience. There are obviously good and bad ways to do this, but I don't necessarily believe we should be drawing a bright line between science communication and popular communication. Certainly if makes things more accessible doesn't harm the scientific content. So I wanted to clarify your position, because I'm not sure I understand it correctly, regarding communicating science to a broad audience.

On titles specifically, I think the first thing to note is that not many people outside academia read the titles of articles. Even if they did, they couldn't read the articles themselves because they're, unfortunately, behind paywalls. So it doesn't seem to me that getting popular attention is a major factor in funny titles. It may make a journalist more likely to give it a second look, but probably not much more than that.

My guess is that the audience is much more within academia, and it's not clear to me that there's anything wrong with self-promoting in this way, unless you're really debasing the science in some meaningful way -- but we have a long history of funny titles in the field and I don't think they've done much damage. It just adds a little levity, even though when the field goes through identity crises maybe that's not the best face to show to the world?

Thanks for your insightful comment. My concern is that the popular and the scientific get conflated in some of these journals. I think researchers should be doing two things: (1) write report-like scientific papers and (2) provide more entertaining and easier-to-digest versions of the research in the form of blogs (which are not behind paywalls) or popular articles. This is where levity can roam free (pardon my mixing of metaphors).

Scientific papers are part of the scientific record and frivolity should be kept to a minimum. After all a behemoth/warhorse is a serious beast (see my earlier post http://rolfzwaan.blogspot.nl/2013/01/breeding-behemoth.html).